Using Random Utility Structural Demand Models to Infer the Value of Quality Information

本次能源经济学研讨会邀请到加州大学伯克利分校农业和资源经济学教授Sofia Berto Villas-Boas做学术演讲。

时间：12月28日，星期四，14:00—16:00

地点：中国人民大学明德主楼623会议室

报告摘要：

By conducting a field experiment, we investigate whether consumers value expert opinion labels on wine as a form of reducing asymmetric information about product quality. Using the macro-level data for treated and control stores, we estimate a structural random coefficient demand model for wine. With the household micro dataset, we estimate a random coefficient mixed logit demand specification, allowing for consumer heterogeneity in demand for wine. Finally, using counterfactual simulations we estimate the changes in consumer surplus resulting from available quality information in the form of expert opinion scores. Using the micro level dataset we find that removing scores leads to significant welfare losses especially for lower income consumers and for men. Overall, using the macro level dataset for treated and control stores, we estimate there to be a significant welfare loss eliminating scores of roughly one percent of total wine revenue in the treated store.

作者简介：

Sofia Berto Villas-Boas is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. Born in Portugal in 1971 she received her Ph.D. in Economics from U. C. Berkeley in May 2002. Her research interests include industrial organization, consumer behavior, food policy, and environmental regulation. Her recent empirical work estimates the effects of policies on consumer behavior, such a bottled water tax, a plastic bag ban, and a soda tax campaign and its implementation. Other published work has focused on the economics behind wholesale price discrimination banning legislation, contractual relationships along a vertical supply chain, and identifying the role of those contracts in explaining pass-through of cost shocks along the supply chain into retail prices that consumers face. She has published in top economics and field journals such as Review of Economic Studies, Rand Journal of Economics, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Marketing Science, Management Science, and Review of Economics and Statistics.